Page:Mongolia, the Tangut country, and the solitudes of northern Tibet vol 1 (1876).djvu/352

 also to the points of the compass, and to any other expression of numbers in a series of ten or twelve. And the Chinese days are not grouped into weeks of seven days, with definite names, but by cycles of sixty days. —[Y.]

So far as we know the earliest character employed by the Mongols for writing their own language was that which they borrowed from the Uighur Turks of the Kashgar country. This was the character commonly used in the chancery of Chinghiz-Khan and his immediate successors. This Uighur character had been borrowed from the old Syriac; and as we find names in Syriac upon the famous Christian monument of Singanfu (A.D. 781), there can be little doubt that it had been introduced into Eastern Turkestan by the Nestorian clergy.

A Lama, Sája Pandita by name, was employed at the court of Kublaï Khan (latter part of thirteenth century) in modifying this Syro-Uighur alphabet so as to fit it better to the Mongol language. He is said to have introduced the system of connecting the letters by continuous lines from top to bottom, 'like the marks cut on tally-sticks.' Some have alleged that even the old Syriac was written vertically; but in any case the language of William de Rubruk (1253), in speaking of the Uighur writing, most precisely describes the vertical direction of the modern Mongol script. Sája died before he had completed his alphabetic system.

His successor, Bashpa Lama, threw aside the Uighur model, and invented a square character founded on a Tibetan modification of the Devanagari. Kublaï himself persistently patronised this alphabet, and tried to force it into use, but it took no root.

Kublaï's successor, Temur or Oljaïtu Khan,